It's increasingly rare for Congress to actually pass bills into law, but Friday brought some good news from Capitol Hill: More than a year after the exemption covering phone unlocking expired and a White House petition on the topic collected some 114,000 signatures, a narrow bill offering a limited carve-out for consumers unlocking phones made its way to the President's desk to be signed into law.

As a refresher: the notion that phone unlocking might violate copyright law comes from an ill-conceived section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prevents the circumvention of technical measures around copyrighted works. If such measures are understood to include restrictions on phone software, then unlocking may violate the DMCA—an outcome Congress never intended.

One of the bitterest struggles against DRM is still taking place on the Web's own home turf — at the World Wide Web Consortium, the Web's own standards organization. Last year, the consortium accepted as in scope the development of Encrypted Media Extensions, an addition to the HTML5 standard intended to support DRM within browsers. EME envisages a future where restricted content could be served within Web pages, apparently as a fully-fledged element of the Web ecosystem, but locked away from user control or fair use, and controlled by tools that can override user preferences.

DRM and the laws that back it up actively undermine our computer security. On this Day Against DRM, the first one since we learned about the US government’s efforts to sabotage the integrity of our cryptography and security technology, it's more important than ever to consider how the unintended consequences of copyright enforcement make us all less safe.

EVENT TODAY: We're taking this day to educate people about the threats of DRM and the current policy challenges we face around DRM. We just completed a live video discussion at 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT to learn more about these fights and what we can do to take back our rights to control over the digital media and devices that we own. EFF Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz, International Director Danny O'Brien, and Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton were featured on this live discussion moderated by Activist April Glaser.